166 The Cretaceous Seas 



sand along the river shore. See how the leaves 

 have fallen in it, some lie flat, others with stem 

 down, are half buried; all will be covered with 

 the ocean mud at high tide, there they will re- 

 main until pressed by the masses of rock that will 

 be laid down upon the deposit, it will be harden- 

 ed into sand stone, and the leaf impressions will 

 be preserved for millions of years. Until in the 

 twentieth century, I will dig them from the solid 

 rock in the central plains of Kansas, and Les- 

 quereux and Ward, and Knowlton and Wilson, 

 will identify them." 



So we wandered on through mighty aisles in 

 this great temple, where God loved to walk, 

 though all unseen by our mortal eyes, we felt His 

 presence near. "O Papa," cried Maud. "See the 

 ground is strewn with edible acorns. There were 

 no squirrels last winter to store them away. And 

 there are some ripe figs among the green ones in 

 yonder tree. If you will gather the figs, I will 

 fill my apron with acorns and we will have a new 

 dish for dinner." "All right," I replied and soon 

 gathered a large supply. We carried our treas- 

 ures home; and while Maud cracked the acorns 

 between two cobble stones, I secured a strong 

 shell for a morter and a rounded stone for a pes- 

 tle and ground the fruit and nuts together, which 

 we made into little cakes, they with hard boiled 

 turtle eggs made a dinner we enjoyed. 



I had scraped a shell full of salt from the face 

 of a precipice where the water of the sea had 



